An Attempt to Discover the Laws of Literature

Should literary criticism be an art or a science? A surprising amount depends on the answer to that question. If you’re an English major, what should you study: the idiosyncratic group of writers who happen to interest you (art), or literary history and theory (science)? If you’re an English professor, how should you spend your time: producing “readings” of the literary works that you care about (art), or looking for the patterns that shape whole literary forms or periods (science)? Faced with this question, most people try to split the difference: if you relate to criticism as an art, you take a few theory classes; if you relate to it as a science, you put on bravura close readings. (Louis Menand’s article about Paul de Man, in this week’s magazine, quotes the critic Peter Brooks, who recalls how de Man could “sit in front of a text and just pluck magical things out of it.”) Almost no one, meanwhile, wants to answer the question definitively, because, for a critic, alternating between one’s artistic and scientific temperaments is fun—it’s like switching between the ocean and the sun at the beach.

Franco Moretti, a professor at Stanford, whose essay collection “Distant Reading” just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, fascinates critics in large part because he does want to answer the question definitively. He thinks that literary criticism ought to be a science. In 2005, in a book called “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History,” he used computer-generated visualizations to map, among other things, the emergence of new genres. In 2010, he founded the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to analyzing literature with software. The basic idea in Moretti’s work is that, if you really want to understand literature, you can’t just read a few books or poems over and over (“Hamlet,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Waste Land”). Instead, you have to work with hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into data, and analyzing that data, you can discover facts about literature in general—facts that are true not just about a small number of canonized works but about what the critic Margaret Cohen has called the “Great Unread.” At the Literary Lab, for example, Moretti is involved in a project to map the relationships between characters in hundreds of plays, from the time of ancient Greece through the nineteenth century. These maps—which look like spiderwebs, rather than org charts—can then be compared; in theory, the comparisons could reveal something about how character relationships have changed through time, or how they differ from genre to genre. Moretti believes that these types of analyses can highlight what he calls “the regularity of the literary field. Its patterns, its slowness.” They can show us the forest rather than the trees.

Moretti’s work has helped to make “computational criticism,” and the digital humanities more generally, into a real intellectual movement. When, the week before last, Stanford announced that undergraduates would be able to enroll in “joint majors” combining computer science with either English or music, it was hard not to see it as a sign of Moretti’s influence. Yet Moretti has critics. They point out that, so far, the results of his investigations have been either wrong or underwhelming. (A typical Moretti finding is that, in eighteenth-century Britain, for instance, the titles of novels grew shorter as the market for novels grew larger—a fact that is “interesting” only in quotes.) And yet these sorts of objections haven’t dimmed the enthusiasm for Moretti’s work. That’s because, no matter how Moretti’s individual research projects turn out, his method, in itself, makes a meaningful statement. It pushes critics to rethink what they do (especially critics who think of themselves as well-read). In an essay called “Conjectures on World Literature”—published in 2000, and collected in “Distant Reading”—Moretti puts it this way:

What does it mean, studying world literature? How do we do it? I work on west European narrative between 1790 and 1930, and already feel like a charlatan outside of Britain and France. World literature?

Many people have read more and better than I have, of course, but still, we are talking hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading “more” hardly seems to be the solution…. “I work on west European narrative, etc….” Not really, I work on its canonical fraction, which is not even 1 per cent of published literature…. There are thirty thousand nineteenth-century British novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thousand—no one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will. And then there are French novels, Chinese, Argentinian, American….

Set aside Moretti’s analyses: the numbers themselves make you see literature differently—as something vast, social, and impersonal that is perhaps best approached in a statistical way. By 2005, Moretti had pinned down these numbers and charted the production of novels over time. You can see some of the results in “Graphs, Maps, Trees.” It’s a shame they aren’t included in “Distant Reading,” because they’re among the best things that Moretti has done. His graphs that track novels published per year have an almost poetic quality, setting ambition and effort on the y-axis, against the erosions of time on the x-axis. An extraordinary chart, “British novelistic genres, 1740-1900,” shows what Moretti calls “a rather regular changing of the guard,” as once vital genres—the “conversion novel,” the “ramble novel,” the “silver-fork novel”—flourish and then disappear.

The grandeur of this expanded scale gives Moretti’s work aesthetic power. (It plays a larger role in his appeal, I suspect, than most Morettians would like to admit.) And Moretti’s approach has a certain moral force, too. One of the pleasures of “Distant Reading” is that it assembles many essays, published over a long period of time, into a kind of intellectual biography; this has the effect of emphasizing Moretti’s Marxist roots. Moretti’s impulses are inclusive and utopian. He wants critics to acknowledge all the books that they don’t study; he admires the collaborative practicality of scientific work. Viewed from Moretti’s statistical mountaintop, traditional literary criticism, with its idiosyncratic, personal focus on individual works, can seem self-indulgent, even frivolous. What’s the point, his graphs seem to ask, of continuing to interpret individual books—especially books that have already been interpreted over and over? Interpreters, Moretti writes, “have already said what they had to.” Better to focus on “the laws of literary history”—on explanation, rather than interpretation.

All this sounds austere and self-serious. It isn’t. “Distant Reading” is a pleasure to read. Moretti is a witty and welcoming writer, and, if his ideas sometimes feel rough, they’re rarely smooth from overuse. I have my objections, of course. I’m skeptical, for example, about the idea that there are “laws of literary history”; for all his techno-futurism, Moretti can seem old-fashioned in his eagerness to uncover hidden patterns and structures within culture. But Moretti is no upstart. He is patient, experienced, and open-minded. It’s obvious that he intends to keep gathering data, and, where it’s possible, to replace his speculations with answers. In some ways, the book’s receiving an award reflects the role that Moretti has played in securing a permanent seat at the table for a new critical paradigm—something that happens only rarely.

Even so, my guess is that, while many critics will admire Moretti, relatively few will follow him. The technical skills are learnable; English majors can take computer-science courses. But the sacrifices, intellectually and, as it were, artistically, are too great. Moretti, it seems to me, has set out on a one-way mission. In ordinary literary criticism—the kind that splits the difference between art and science—there is a give-and-take between the general and the particular. You circle back from theory to text; you compromise, or ennoble, science with art. But Moretti’s criticism doesn’t work that way. Generality is the whole point. By the end of his journey, Moretti may be able to see all of literature, but he’ll see it as an astronaut on Mars might see the Earth: from afar, with no way home. In 2006, the literary Web site the Valve hosted an online symposium on “Graphs, Maps, Trees,” with Moretti as a participant. In one of his responses, he asked, rhetorically, whether his approach “abolish[es] the pleasure of reading literature.” His answer:

No—it just means that between the pleasure and the knowledge of literature (or at least a large part of knowledge) there is no continuity. Knowing is not reading.

Perhaps it’s odd to feel gratitude for the work of a critic with whom you regularly disagree, but I feel grateful for Moretti. As readers, we now find ourselves benefitting from a division of critical labor. We can continue to read the old-fashioned way. Moretti, from afar, will tell us what he learns.